With the approval of the 802.11g standard by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a number of companies have started to announce plans to roll out products amid fears of technology bumps along the way.
Although the IEEE approved the standard, the 802.11 working group has yet to ratify the standard. That is causing companies like Texas Instruments to hold off shipping their products.
The standard extends the data rate of 802.11b from 11 Megabits per second to 54 Megabits per second with backward compatibility, a quality some analysts think might compromise the speed of 802.11g technology.
But the industry is still poised to move ahead.
“The IEEE is now just a signature away from approving the 802.11 standard, the Wi-Fi Alliance is poised to certify interoperability, and millions of pre-standard products are in customers’ hands ready for a standard’s compliant software,” noted Ken Furer, research analyst at market research firm IDC.
Companies like Broadcom Corp., Cisco Systems, Linksys, Marvell Libertas, D-Link, NetGear and Intersil have already announced products.
“During the (first) quarter, the emergence of the 802.11g market more than offset traditional seasonal weakness, and despite not having a finalized standard, 802.11g products comprised 29 percent of SOHO-infrastructure revenues,” said Dell’Oro Group.
The standard is expected to enable enhanced voice, data and voice over Internet Protocol as well as video.
Industry is also looking at interoperating not only g and b, but also a, which offers the most speed although it does not have the breadth of b. But a operates in a different frequency band of 5 GHz.
“Several vendors have introduced 802.11 g products that will likely have a dramatic market impact in 2003, and many vendors are already having success with 802.11a products,” noted Infonetics Research.
